When I was a girl in the 1960's, spending a couple of weeks each summer poking around the woods of the Catskills or the Adirondacks, the two most exciting things that I could find were a four-leaf clover and any sort of fossil. The first betokened great luck for the future, the second the magic of an unspeakably distant past. Admittedly, the few fossils I stumbled across were not glamorous, usually no more than traces of a tiny, ancient leaf. But still they were fossils, my private bit of the Museum of Natural History.

I wish I had been aware back then of Mary Anning, a remarkable girl who has been called the greatest fossilist the world has ever known. For one thing, I might have been inspired to dig deeper and look harder for fossils myself. For another, I was always parched for stories about brave, brilliant women. And when it came to brilliance and bravery, Mary had it, literally, in spades: with practically every toss of her shovel, she unearthed yet another magnificent and scientifically significant fossil.

Since this year is the bicentennial of Mary Anning's birth, it's not surprising to see the publication of three children's books about the indefatigable fossil hunter, who made some of her most important discoveries before reaching adolescence. Because little is known of the details of Mary's life, two of the authors felt free to tell her story as they imagined it to be, while one -- Don Brown, the author of ''Rare Treasure'' -- hews pretty closely to the facts as they appear in history books. All three books have their charms, and convey the extraordinary nature of a girl who lived in an era when it was difficult enough for a woman even from the gentry to indulge a passion for science, let alone an impoverished girl with little formal schooling.

Of the lot, I preferred ''Rare Treasure'' for its crispness, accuracy and lack of sentimentality. My preschool daughter, on the other hand, was partial to ''Stone Girl, Bone Girl,'' by Laurence Anholt. She studied its vivid illustrations by Sheila Moxley -- a cross between Grandma Moses and Marc Chagall -- and seemed riveted by its emphasis on moments of danger and sadness, like the one when the infant Mary is almost killed by a bolt of lightning, or when she returns from an outing to learn that her father has died.

Anning spent all 48 years of her life in her birthplace, Lyme Regis, a small port town on the southern shore of England. Lyme Regis was, and is, rich in fossils from the seas of the Jurassic period, 135 million to 195 million years ago. Her parents, Richard and Mary, had as many as 10 children, but only two survived to adulthood, young Mary and her older brother, Joseph. Richard Anning was a cabinetmaker and amateur finder of fossils, which he, like most people of the time, called ''curiosities.'' But Richard, who died in 1810, never rivaled his daughter in sharpness of eye or commitment to the paleontological craft.

Mary's first big break occurred when she was 10 or 11 years old and discovered the fossil of an ichthyosaur, or ''fish lizard.'' Other remnants of ichthyosaurs had been found before, but none as perfect as hers, and none as renowned in the scientific community of London. In ''Stone Girl, Bone Girl,'' Mary is spurred to hunt for the ichthyosaur by Annie Philpot, a well-to-do neighbor and amateur paleontologist who shows her a giant fossil tooth and marvels to think what its possessor must have looked like. In ''Mary Anning and the Sea Dragon,'' by Jeannine Atkins, Mary finds the fish lizard on her own initiative. ''Rare Treasure'' gives the likeliest, if least romantic, version of the discovery: her brother finds part of the ichthyosaur's skull first, but doesn't make of it what he should. Instead, it is Mary who returns to the spot beneath the cliffs where her brother had discovered the skull and painstakingly disinters the rest of the huge skeleton.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

However she got her treasure, she quickly became a local celebrity. Professors from London came to meet the ''fossil girl,'' among them Richard Owens, the scientist who coined the word ''dinosaur.'' Even the King of Saxony paid her a visit. Her fame did not pay the family bills, though, and so Mary sold the ichthyosaur to a wealthy collector, as she sold most of her curiosities. In fact, it was Mary Anning who inspired the familiar childhood tongue twister ''She sells seashells by the seashore.''

Nevertheless, Anning was not in it solely for the shillings. She studied her bones, categorized them, read books about them and sought to understand them as a scientist would.

In 1823 she made her most important discovery: the first skeleton of a plesiosaur, another sea-dwelling reptile. It was a nine-foot-long creature with, in the words of Don Brown, ''a long, serpentine neck, a lizard's head, a crocodile's teeth, a chameleon's ribs and the paddles of a whale.''

MARY'S tenacity shines forth throughout the various renditions of her life. She worked for hour upon hour under grueling conditions, chipping away with a hammer and chisel while waves lashed at her skirts and numbed her fingers, or under cliffs prone to mudslides. She usually labored alone, for her friends and eventually even her brother found the work tedious. ''In one day,'' writes Jeannine Atkins, ''she usually exposed an area half the size of her hand.''

Anning never married or had children, but she was proud of her passion and success. ''I am well known throughout the whole of Europe,'' she told a man as she autographed his notebook.

I wish that Mary Anning had left behind more of herself: diaries, letters, scientific notebooks. I wish, too, that her scientific contemporaries, who benefited handsomely from her fossil discoveries, had made a greater effort to give her credit, and that reporters of the day had interviewed her, written biographies of her, told us what she was like.

But such are the mutterings of a crabby adult. As Mary Anning resurrected the dragons of old, so this new crop of picture books brings the young fossilist wonderfully to life.